Vaster Than Empires
by AstroGirl
Summary: A crossover featuring Zhaan and Jabe the tree woman, from Doctor Who's 'The End of the World.' Contains femmeslash, but not terribly explicit.


**Vaster Than Empires**  
**by AstroGirl**

She dissolves into light, wormhole-blue, reaching out to welcome death with a serene and joyful soul... And she does not die.

* * *

Wormholes are mysterious things. She should have learned that much from her time in Crichton's company. She wishes she could ask him about this one, hear his thoughts on how it could have brought her here, and why. But Crichton is five billion cycles dead.

She finds she envies him that. This distant future surely has no place for her. Delvia has been forgotten, her people and all they achieved lost somewhere in the depths of history. She is more permanently and hopelessly separated from her home than John Crichton ever was from his. Her soul, prepared for death, finds itself unable in the midst of so much lonely strangeness to remember how to live. She is like one of Stark's _zy-limbron_ ghosts: not dead, not alive. Disconnected. Detached.

She finds a planet, almost at random, because her physical self has to be _somewhere_. But it's a bad choice: too vibrant, too crowded, a place of cold cities where the voice of the Goddess is drowned out in the rushing cacophony of a dozen species, all bent on obscure, urgent business of their own. She seeks out oases of quiet where she can -- a fountain, a temple, a park -- and pretends to meditate. In truth, she mainly stares sightlessly at nothing, listening not to the Goddess but only to the aching emptiness in her soul.

Until a woman sits next to her, on a bench, in a park.

"Forgive me." A soft voice, warm and friendly. "I don't mean to intrude..."

Zhaan blinks, her eyes slowly focusing, and turns her head. The smell of chlorophyll greets her nostrils, achingly familiar and sweet.

"It's just that I was curious. I didn't recognize your species, and it's so rare to encounter another flora-evolved line, especially in a place like this. You _are_ flora?" The stranger smiles, and a smattering of leaves atop her head rustle gently in the wind.

"I... Yes. Delvian. You won't have heard of us." Zhaan loathes the bitterness that lurks behind the words, but the woman tilts her head, looking curious and sympathetic.

"Are you all right? You look... lost."

"Lost." She gives a small, humorless laugh. "Yes. In more ways than one."

There's a moment of silence, and Zhaan imagines the stranger is about to rise and leave, but instead she suddenly finds a hand wrapping itself around her own. It's warm and strong, with the comforting solidity of wood. It reminds her of the _zel_-trees she slept beneath as a child.

"I'm sorry," the woman says. "This isn't a very good place for creatures like us to be lost."

"No." Zhaan finds herself squeezing the offered hand tightly, clinging to it as if it were a branch thrown to keep her from being swept down a river. "But I'm afraid I don't have anywhere better to be."

"You've nowhere to go?" Zhaan shakes her head, and the woman looks at her for a long, long moment, then gives her a slow, gentle smile. "You could come with me."

Zhaan blinks at her, surprised. "Why? I mean... Why would you offer? You don't know me." And she has found disturbingly little charity from the beings of this time. Or, in truth, any other.

The woman smiles. "I suppose I've always been drawn to lost souls. It's said my ancestors gave shade to lost and weary travelers, you know. Perhaps it's in the genes."

Zhaan has almost forgotten what it's like to smile. It feels surprisingly good. "Well, wherever such generousness of spirit comes from, I cherish it." She lays her other hand on top of the woman's. "I am... Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan." It has hurt a little, lately, to refer to herself as "Pa'u." Is it truly a fitting title for one whose sacrifice and spirit the Goddess has rejected? But with another hand in hers, the pain is oddly less.

"I am Jabe." She looks almost as if she expects Zhaan to recognize the name, but it means nothing to her, save that it belongs to a new-met friend.

* * *

Jabe's home is a forest, deep and rich and old. The sort of place where Delvians have always felt a sense of the sacred. A place where one can hear the voice of the Goddess and, perhaps as importantly, the whisperings of one's own heart.

Jabe leads her to a glade: sun-dappled, quiet, alive with slow growth rooted in soil and reaching for the sky. "It's a lovely place, isn't it? I come here when I'm feeling troubled, and I always leave feeling better."

Zhaan has no words. She stands there, surrounded by beauty freely offered to her like the touch of the Goddess's love, and has no words. Instead, she takes Jabe's face in her hands and expresses her gratitude with a kiss. Jabe's lips taste like Delvian spring and exotic alien spices. Arms slip around her, and she rests her forehead against Jabe's and feels as if she has found somewhere new to call home.

* * *

They make love, sensual and slow, beneath the leaves of Jabe's sessile ancestors in the light of a warm yellow sun. Jabe is as different from her as any animal species she has been with, and their pleasure comes as much from exploration as from culmination, the touch of Jabe's lianas as strange and beautiful to Zhaan as the touch of Zhaan's mind is to Jabe. Still, chloroplast calls to chloroplast, kindred genes recognizing their own. Zhaan has always thought of making love with a creature of animal flesh -- or of energy -- as a lovely coming together of diversities, but this is that and more. It is simultaneously embracing the alien and loving oneself. More importantly, it is loving _Jabe_. Jabe with her strong, giving soul; her kind, beautiful eyes; the rough warmth of her skin, the glint of sensual humor in her smile...

The sun has long set by the time they are spent, and Zhaan sleeps that night feeling more whole than she has since the first moment she realized she was still alive.

* * *

"Are you sure you don't want to come with me?"

Zhaan shakes her head. "I've spent too much time of late thinking of death and destruction and endings. It is better for me to remain here for a while, in the midst of life. I'll probably spend the time meditating."

Jabe nods understandingly, then hesitates. "If you'd rather I stayed with you..."

"No, no, my dear. It is entirely proper for you to bid the world of your ancestors farewell. I think well of you for it." She smiles. "Besides, you may well find some other lost soul who needs your help, and who am I to keep from them what you so kindly gave to me?"

"All right." Jabe laughs and clasps her arm, her grip loving and strong. "You'll be here when I get back?"

"Of course I will." Zhaan embraces her. "I'll see you then."

And Jabe leaves for the end of the world.


End file.
